with extraordinary delight, but a delight of the kind that is freighted with tension, seemingly to have commanded, with solittle effort, this intense focus. To be paid such unusual attention was a cordial to her famished heart, which might well have given wings to almost unbearable hope.
But it is a hallmark of the damaged that when it comes to their own desire instinctively, ruinously, they tend to court its opposite. So at the point when it dawned on her how much it mattered that he should stay, she suddenly asked, ‘Shouldn’t you be going? Haven’t you things to do?’
And Thomas looking at his watch said, ‘Oh hell! Damn and blast, I should.’
Even so, he didn’t go at once but lingered further over the table, still talking.
‘He talked better than anyone I had ever known. Not that what he said then was anything I could easily reproduce, but I don’t know…’
‘I expect you do.’
‘It was as if…’ Again she stalled.
‘It cancelled the loneliness?’
She appeared to consider this before saying, ‘It was as if I were meeting someone whom I had known intimately and from whom I had been separated for a very long time.’
‘And he felt the same?’ It crossed my mind that this was what I would feel were I to meet Jonny.
She made the wounded-bird gesture with her hands.
‘How could I tell? I’d never talked so comfortably to anyone before. He seemed to like me, and to want to go on talking. But how could I know he wasn’t like that with everyone? He seemed so easy, so fluent I couldn’t imagine that had much to do with my being there.’
Of course she couldn’t. Your average egotist is armoured against disappointments for, to the egotist, he or she is the undisputed centre of the whole world. That my patient had been given sight of something rarer and more compelling than this, I understood. We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.
3
B ESIDES HIS VOICE, IT WAS HIS HANDS SHE REMEMBERED MOST , though she had not been conscious of taking them in at the time. Capable hands, she told me, with square fingers and clean nails. I don’t know if at that point I glanced at my own, or if I only tried to picture what they were like. Clean and neatly clipped, I would have hoped. My mother used to say that it is the small details that betray character.
Of what they talked, on that first meeting, I am left with an impression rather than detail. I doubt she could have given me with any great exactitude more than the broad brush strokes which—between bites of sandwich, eaten ferociously—she made that winter afternoon. In any case, it is not the substance of a conversation but the way the heart irradiates it that infuses it with meaning.
Thomas, she learned, was an art historian whose work took him abroad and only occasionally back to England. He had an Oxford base in someone else’s house. Bainbridge, from a long habit of personal trust—and the generosity she herself had enjoyed—had bestowed on his friend a house key and the invitation to stay whenever he found himself in need of a Londonbed. She gained half an impression that maybe there were other beds available, should Thomas have wanted to take advantage of them, but he preferred Bainbridge’s because the hospitality came, by and large, with no strings.
Finding himself the previous evening unexpectedly late in London after a lecture, Thomas had tried on the phone and failed to get Bainbridge (notoriously unpredictable in his movements) and had therefore taken up the standing invitation. He had stayed the night and was out buying a paper when, unaware of any other presence, my patient had arrived to take her daily bath. That much she discovered in Bainbridge’s kitchen, over the Formica table.
What her part was in their conversation again I can only guess. Compared to Thomas’s, her life appeared to her barrenly uneventful. She told me she mostly listened while talk flowed from the
But it is a hallmark of the damaged that when it comes to their own desire instinctively, ruinously, they tend to court its opposite. So at the point when it dawned on her how much it mattered that he should stay, she suddenly asked, ‘Shouldn’t you be going? Haven’t you things to do?’
And Thomas looking at his watch said, ‘Oh hell! Damn and blast, I should.’
Even so, he didn’t go at once but lingered further over the table, still talking.
‘He talked better than anyone I had ever known. Not that what he said then was anything I could easily reproduce, but I don’t know…’
‘I expect you do.’
‘It was as if…’ Again she stalled.
‘It cancelled the loneliness?’
She appeared to consider this before saying, ‘It was as if I were meeting someone whom I had known intimately and from whom I had been separated for a very long time.’
‘And he felt the same?’ It crossed my mind that this was what I would feel were I to meet Jonny.
She made the wounded-bird gesture with her hands.
‘How could I tell? I’d never talked so comfortably to anyone before. He seemed to like me, and to want to go on talking. But how could I know he wasn’t like that with everyone? He seemed so easy, so fluent I couldn’t imagine that had much to do with my being there.’
Of course she couldn’t. Your average egotist is armoured against disappointments for, to the egotist, he or she is the undisputed centre of the whole world. That my patient had been given sight of something rarer and more compelling than this, I understood. We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.
3
B ESIDES HIS VOICE, IT WAS HIS HANDS SHE REMEMBERED MOST , though she had not been conscious of taking them in at the time. Capable hands, she told me, with square fingers and clean nails. I don’t know if at that point I glanced at my own, or if I only tried to picture what they were like. Clean and neatly clipped, I would have hoped. My mother used to say that it is the small details that betray character.
Of what they talked, on that first meeting, I am left with an impression rather than detail. I doubt she could have given me with any great exactitude more than the broad brush strokes which—between bites of sandwich, eaten ferociously—she made that winter afternoon. In any case, it is not the substance of a conversation but the way the heart irradiates it that infuses it with meaning.
Thomas, she learned, was an art historian whose work took him abroad and only occasionally back to England. He had an Oxford base in someone else’s house. Bainbridge, from a long habit of personal trust—and the generosity she herself had enjoyed—had bestowed on his friend a house key and the invitation to stay whenever he found himself in need of a Londonbed. She gained half an impression that maybe there were other beds available, should Thomas have wanted to take advantage of them, but he preferred Bainbridge’s because the hospitality came, by and large, with no strings.
Finding himself the previous evening unexpectedly late in London after a lecture, Thomas had tried on the phone and failed to get Bainbridge (notoriously unpredictable in his movements) and had therefore taken up the standing invitation. He had stayed the night and was out buying a paper when, unaware of any other presence, my patient had arrived to take her daily bath. That much she discovered in Bainbridge’s kitchen, over the Formica table.
What her part was in their conversation again I can only guess. Compared to Thomas’s, her life appeared to her barrenly uneventful. She told me she mostly listened while talk flowed from the
Similar Books
